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“... meaning a ball of thread or yarn.’ In mid-Victorian England, clues were satisfying objects to be grasped, then unknotted or unravelled. Clues pointed the way to go. On his way into the Minotaur’s labyrinth, Theseus unravels a ball of red thread given him by Ariadne, so that he can find his way out again, gathering the ...”

“... but that was because of their own vicious and destructive behaviour. Many readers were impressed by Windschuttle’s apparent mastery of the sources and his declared devotion to empirical detail. Boyce’s essay demolished those claims in a beautifully systematic discussion of the real range of evidence, and a judicious assessment of what we can know, what ...”

“... of Greek and Roman women is that the Greek and Roman men who wrote about them first tended to be more interested in writing about other men. As a result, famous ancient women are usually famous because they had more famous male relatives. The protagonists of the ten books so far published in Oxford University Press’s series on ‘Women in ...”

“... The Compleat Drawing-Book​, published by Fleet Street printseller Robert Sayer in 1755, is a handbook for the amateur artist that aims to provide ‘Proper Instructions to Youth for their Entertainment and Improvement in this Art’. The core of the book is a series of ‘Many and Curious Specimens’: prints from images ‘engrav’d on one hundred copper-plates’ that present vignettes to study and copy ...”

“... When​ I first came to Berlin in 2002, house façades were still pockmarked by shrapnel, weeds grew in the empty plots of bombsites and the wind whipped round the new skyscrapers on Potsdamer Platz, built to fill the no-man’s-land between former East and former West. In Hannah’s Dress, Pascale Hugues writes about one of these ordinary-extraordinary streets: the one she lives on ...”

“... Lynda Nead​ ’s new study of the ways in which postwar Britain was represented by what was not yet called its media is tirelessly oblique. She contrives to see everything through the reductionist lenses of colour and colourlessness. She leans heavily on Raymond Williams’s notion of a ‘structure of feeling’ which supposedly defines the ‘particular and characteristic colour of a period ...”

“... The​ United Kingdom has in recent years been blighted by a compensation culture generated by health and safety legislation and human rights laws and promoted by well-paid legal aid lawyers and credulous judges. We know these to be facts because newspapers and electronic media have exposed them fearlessly ...”

“... ball, fleetingly registers the contrast between her torchlit beauty and the surrounding darkness by imagining a jewel sparkling in the earlobe of a nameless African? For the scholars in this important group of critical studies, his aside serves principally as evidence of an emergent racialised system visible throughout Elizabethan culture. Night is ...”

“... canonised in 1931, is often called the patron saint of natural scientists, but he might as well be called the patron saint of curiosity. The 38 volumes of his collected works cover not only theology, law and logic, but almost every science known to his era: zoology and botany, physiology and medicine, astronomy and astrology, geography, mineralogy – even ...”

“... Peruvian guano. In response, the United States – itself in the midst of a boom in cotton grown by an enslaved workforce on exhausted soil – passed the Guano Islands Act of 1856. The Act encouraged US citizens to plant the Stars and Stripes on top of the mountains of guano on around two hundred islands, though the sovereign claim to all but nine was ...”

“... the eve​ of the first lockdown, I made my way to the Hammersmith Apollo to attend a performance by Whitney Houston. It was a chill, ominous night and the people outside the venue were wide-eyed and excited about their forthcoming encounter with the undead. I had come along in the course of my duties as a hopeless necromantic. I don’t think I have ever ...”

“... It is some time since I wrote a diary here. It will be seen I have had plenty to write about. I should explain that there are two versions of a period of my life. One is the version of other people, a version which others try to impose upon me. The other is my own version, a version equally genuine and much more unusual ...”

“... song, courtship, migration and many other avian activities. Unfortunately, the book will not be so much use to anyone who wants details about particular species. There is no section that deals with the whole life of each type of bird or other animal. But one can learn about the idiosyncrasies, say, of cuckoos, homing pigeons, owls or bower-birds. Of ...”

“... Conservative Party,’ and saying he was ‘most grateful’ for the support extended to the Party by Root. Write a silly letter and you will get a civil answer. That is the lesson to be learned from a book which the publishers think (perhaps correctly) ‘will produce a warm glow in the hearts of ordinary folk ...”

“... under Article 5 and the right to a fair trial under Article 6), its actions were justified by the emergency caused by the Border Campaign. It decided to refer the case to the new court. The questions the commission asked the court to consider were ‘whether or not, from 13 July to 11 December 1957, there existed a ...”